I took a bit of a break from blogging, but have been playing WoW non-stop since patch 3.2 and have plenty to say about it all. Still hating the Unholy Blight change but lets move on. The big story about Patch 3.2 was in regards to alts. Patch 3.2 was a god send to people who are currently leveling alts or were planning on doing it in the near term. My wife is taking the opportunity to level a Paladin, and got the chest and shoulders, both of which offer 10% experience boost for kills and quest turn ins. Certainly nothing to sneeze at because that 20% experience boost effectively means you really no longer need to grind monsters in between quests and the odd instance run. All that running around is now also much easier to do as you can now get your non-epic land mount at level 20 and your epic land mount at level 40. That certainly helps in the various quest brackets that still have holes the size of buses and have as of yet, not been streamlined (See MMO-Champions explosive revelations of the upcoming Expansion -- CATACLYSM).
Once you do finally get to level 80 you can then immediately start to get Emblems of Conquest which gives you access to Tier 8 (and below) level gear. Not bad for never having stepped foot in a raid instance and similar to what happened with the badges of justice in the Burning Crusade when the Sunwell was released to the world. One I'm taking advantage of to the fullest extent with three different alts at the moment.
The other story about patch 3.2 was the release of the Trial of the Champion (5-man instance) and Trial of the Crusader (10/25-man raid with a Heroic version called Trial of the Grand Crusader with its own 10/25-man version) where Tier 9 gear can be found. It still uses the motif first release with the Argent tournament some months ago, though all grown up now. It's also short--along the line of the old Gruul's or Mags lair, so it's something that most raids will run on one night and then move back into Ulduar. And with new Tier 9 loot in tow.
Not to ignore those who love the PVP side of WoW, Blizzard also release a new battleground -- Isle of Conquest. Fully instanced, it's the first 40v40 BG since AV was released 4 years ago and as far as I can see is a tremendous success. It offers a range of objectives to fight over, vehicle combat, and keeps. I think I still love AV more, but it's a very close choice at this point. BTW Blizzard your changes to Wintergrasp didn't do much in regards to the lag and has some weird side effects like auto-grouping mining bots and once filling the full 40-man raid seems to leave anyone else that didn't get in the raid out on their own. I actually had a raid the other night where a known mining bot was the raid leader. We had openings but couldn't get anyone that popped in after the battle started because the bot simply wasn't inviting. Blizzard definitely has some tweaking to do in order to get all the kinks worked out.
